'It's difficult to talk about regret.'

The former police commander in Tottenham says he regrets the death of Mark Duggan five years ago, but not the operation that led to his killing.

Five years after the 2011 riots, Victor Olisa said it was “difficult to talk about regret” over the shooting of 29-year-old Duggan who was killed by police in Tottenham, sparking protests that led to the disturbances that spread around England.

Olisa, who became the Borough Commander of Haringey 18 months after Duggan’s death, said it was a “significant event that won’t go away” but that the force had no guilt over planning an operation “to stop serious violence occurring”.

Victor Olisa
Victor Olisa was the head of the police in Tottenham and is now the Met's head of diversity.

Duggan was killed on 4 August 2011, when police stopped the minicab he was travelling in and tried to arrest him. He died from a gunshot wound to the chest.

Speaking to The Huffington Post UK in June ahead of the anniversary, Olisa said the police had no regret over planning the operation, saying Duggan was suspected of planning an attack and carrying a gun.

“It’s difficult to talk about regret,” he told HuffPost UK. “It was a planned operation that was carried out as effectively as you could imagine, other than unfortunately, Mark being shot.”

PA
Duggan died in 2011. His killing was ruled lawful.

“The fact that Mark lost his life is the same regret that we’d have with anyone losing their life as a result of a police operation, because we don’t go out to carry out an operation in that sense. So there’s regret in that sense that someone lost their life.

“But there’s no regret in the sense of planning an operation to take firearms off the street, planning an operation to stop serious violence occurring when we have intelligence that that’s what’s going to happen. And [there’s no regret] in dealing with… the aftermath of something going wrong, which is what happened in 2011.

“We have to do that, we’re professionals and that’s what we get paid for, but there will be some regret that someone lost their life during the operation.”

Olisa left Haringey in June to become Scotland Yard’s new head of diversity, and is now the Met’s most senior black officer.

Olisa told HuffPost UK that some young people from Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate, where Duggan lived had told him they want to put up a memorial plaque up for him, “just to show that the young people there were just like any other young people, who think about things in a thoughtful way.”

“I emphasized with what they were saying, but I did say to them that as a police officer I couldn’t do that, but I was supportive if they wanted to do it,” Olisa said.

He said he was proud of the work he did as commander in Haringey, where crime reduced 20% in three years under his watch.

He focused on community outreach in an area which has a history of tensions with the police, and saw a riot a Broadwater Farm that killed a police officer in 1985 after a rise in arrests and aggressive stop and searches of young black people.

Olisa believes his work has led to a “confidence increase in the police.”

When he started the job three years ago he felt “like a pariah,” he explained, “purely because I was a police officer and the borough commander, and it was part of the legacy of the years that had gone by and the interactions between the police and local communities.”

He said he now hopes local people think they can trust the police, “to do what they say they are going to do”.